McLaren was not happy with the designs for the P11 supercar and have told the team to take scratch the whole thing and to start fresh and with a whole new look. The new styling sheif will be Frank Stephenson who has designed cars for Fiat, Ferrari, Mini, and BMW.

Stephenson will join McLaren to redesign the family of supercars that McLaren plans to put into production in 2009. â€œThe basic engineering layout is fixed, but the styling is still open,â€ said one source.

Stephenson will also get the chance to design a rumoured open-top version of the P11 and a GTR race version. The latter may be powered by a 600bhp-plus V10. Both the open-top and GTR models are expected to be rolled out in subsequent launch years. The lightweight and more powerful GTR version of McLarenâ€™s iconic F1 was the second best-selling variant. In an eventual total production run of 107 F1s, 64 were customer road cars and 28 were GTR racers.